A Universal Serial Bus (“USB”) is an external bus that supports plug and play installation. Using a USB port of a computer system, a user may connect and disconnect devices without shutting down or restarting the computer. A single USB port may connect multiple peripheral devices, including speakers, telephones, CD-ROM drives, joysticks, tape drives, keyboards, scanners, memory drives, and cameras, such as through daisy chaining the peripheral devices into one port of the computer system.
Flash memory is a type of nonvolatile computer readable medium, similar to EEPROM memory in function, but may be erased in blocks. Because of its block-oriented nature, flash memory is typically used as a supplement to or replacement for hard disks in portable computers. In this context, flash memory is typically built into the unit, available as a PC Card that can be plugged into a PCMCIA slot, or available as a USB device compatible with a USB port.